Having looked at Flam’s signature, I became interested. Isaiah is Jesaja in Swedish and German. In those three languages, the name of the book is the same as that of the prophet himself (as given in Isa. 1:1).

My bilingual Latin-Hebrew Bible (1740) has in its Latin version the book as LIBER JESAIAE and in 1:1 Visio Jeschajæ. Strange difference.

I also looked in a TaNaK from 1828, and in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1984). All three Hebrew books (i.e. including the above-mentioned 1740) were, undotted, named ישעיה and in all of them, 1:1 had ישׁעיהו. Why is there no waw in the book name (or, why is it added to the prophet name)?

My first efforts to post capsized, probably because of busy servers, but I got so far as to note that not all letters from my Windows standard Unicode fonts could be copied (I tried Times and Arial Cyrillic (!) schwa for a transcription, and twice “long s” for the 1:1 quote in Latin). Also, the superscript code [sup] didn’t work. Is there a way to use super- and subscripts? Which font works best for copying non-English letters into posts?

The extra ו (waw) is part of the divine name or Tetragrammaton. At the end of a name it is often either ־יה (-yah), or ־יהו (-yahu). There are a few names where this is the case: Eliyahu haNavi is Elijah the Prophet.

That's to do with a little game called Ketiv-weQere: a rabbinic version of tetris. What is writ, haKetiv, is writ, and there isn't much a mortal should do about it. However, when called upon to recite what's writ, one makes a few alterations: haQere. The most famous example is with the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton, which is NOT read as writ, but pronounced as 'Adonai' (my Lord) in scriptural reading and in prayer, and 'haShem' (the Name) elsewhere. Perhaps some of this happened with personal names. At some stage, the final ו (waw) was not pronounced: perhaps three letters were felt to be too sacred. As the headings of books are not scripture, the K-Q rules do not apply. Whenever the rules do not apply, the spelling follows the sensible Qere.

Apo uses finely honed googling skills. He can search on a phrase he can't even read, but only if it is using the same alphabet that the rest of the world uses when they write it.

So transliterating the Greek alphabet into Roman letters makes it impossible for those of us with such research skills to perform our obsessive-compulsive behavior to find out what the heck the person is talking about!

So transliterating the Greek alphabet into Roman letters makes it impossible for those of us with such research skills to perform our obsessive-compulsive behavior to find out what the heck the person is talking about!

Yup.

BD:

Why only English speakers? What about everybody else who's clueless about Greek?

It would be better to say that Greek written in Roman characters does not make it more accessible to people who understand languages that use a Roman script or any other script, for that matter, including Greek itself, mind you!

Is that better, BD?

Apo

'Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.' -Max Planck